


Dead Sky

by VoidVesper



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 23:43:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16963725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoidVesper/pseuds/VoidVesper
Summary: Kylo's exile after Hux's ultimate betrayal forces him to face who he's become, and to reevaluate what "love" -- and "a lover" --really means.





	Dead Sky

\--------Sky--------

The air here was thin like the veil between worlds, and the sky hung low and heavy in ominous striations of black and violet and wounded streaks of orange.

A bruised sunset.

The man lay shuddering in the wasteland dust below the lurid sky. Blood sharpened the points of his black hair into wet quills laying slick against his battered face. A bullseye of cauterized petals of flesh still smoked in the meat between his shoulder and chest, like a brutal corsage.

He lay there, bottomless warm eyes quavering to the black dilated pupils of the dead, and tried to breathe.

The inarguable _now_ of pain.

Cold, too cold beneath black quilted armor, too cold for someone as thick and vital as him. He could feel the Force ebbing within him. He would not die. Would not. He scrunched his eyes tightly closed and thought about the turncoat who'd put him here, who singed that blaster wound in his shoulder. Who thought he was dead. The hate coiled in his stomach again, that hate you can lean on, that hate that devours your pain and your shame and breathes it out again as the Dark Side and all of its sweet promises. It would sustain him now.

More fuel.

He thought about the father who never loved him. The uncle who betrayed him. The master who exploited him. The underling who put him here.

The woman who broke him.

He thought about these things until the rage was a living thing inside him, until every midichlorian inside the massive terrain of his body vibrated with outrage, until their combined fury rallied his blood to re-flood the veins narrowed by shock and soothe his body's revolt.

The color came back to his scarred cheeks but the cost of the effort was too much. Even the raw demanding throb of his blaster wound was not enough to keep him conscious. The vast and blank and limitless landscape surrounded him like a prison without walls. Just before blacking out he could feel its dry mockery. It laughed at the way his broken body could not lunge out, possessed, to destroy that which had caused him pain, and the piteous revelation that when there is nothing nearby to rage against, there is no salvation in rage.

******  
It could have been minutes or days beneath the eternal roiling sky before he opened his eyes again. His throat was ravaged with a stabbing, serrated thirst.  
A blot of black just at the edge of his vision floated down and landed with clumsy exhaustion on the mineral flats only six meters away. Some ailing beaked animal, downed, terribly lost, its boned membrane wings and a crooked neck too weak to lift its head. It had wandered far from some oasis, just like him, and would die here . . .

No.

Six meters was too far for him to crawl. The creature gave one squawk of protest but was too weak to fight the irresistible waves of the Force that dragged it across the sugary dust into the man's shuddering outstretched hand. He drew it to his mouth and bit into its neck and tore into its viscera, oh, the blood, viscous with the punk of ammonia, don't care, sweet liquid, and its liver lush with it . . .

_Cowards suckle thala-sirens.  
I feed on death._

Wide mouth stained with gore.

In a little while he was restored enough to pull himself up to sitting. This planet was a perfect terrarium, temperate, windless. Changeless as death. Badlands favored small and light-metabolismed species. The size of his body, such a bonus everywhere else, here was a liability. Sitting upright made his head throb in time with his pulse. His vision swam with motes of light as the hallucinogens in the creature's liver crossed into his brain.

He could not tell if what he saw was a vision, or if his Forceless mentor had become a luminous ghost, one with the Force. Vader never came to him in any hour of need but this man did.

"You wish I wasn't your son," he choked.

"I never understood you, kid." The sound of that warm smuggler's rumble, a voice whose echoes shook down to Kylo's conscience. "You needed a different father. What I could teach you . . ." He knew what his father meant. The glib tongue, the steady optimism, the necessarily slippery morality. The despicable, lukewarm grey. Kylo was born to the black and white, to absolutism's purity, to its harsh demands and the unmuddied clarity of its integrity. Yoking himself to it bit it into his mouth like a bridle. But the alternative . . .  
"I still believe in luck, not faith," said his father. "You're the roll of the dice, Kylo, and I had to play you. Because I wouldn't walk away. You were the one game of chance I never cheated at."

"You cheated me."

"I tried to do right by you. I didn't do enough. And I'm sorry."

Sorry. The word and its wash of relief made tears spring to his eyes.  
"Do you forgive me?" he choked.

"I said I would do anything."

The toxins from the creature's liver were wearing off. The throb in Kylo's head was fading to a soft blur.

"You know, Ben," the voice said, its last sad rumble, "I've killed, too. Killed with less thought than you. Maybe what you did to me is fair payback. You think the killer in you is Vader," he said, drifting into the ether. "Maybe it's me . . ."

The motes of light danced one last tango and winked out, goodbye, goodbye. One last sparkle played at the corner of his eye. He rubbed his eye hard, stinging it with the salt and blood and tears on his skin. It wouldn't go away.

Wait.  
Not a mote. A glint of light on the horizon.  
Metal.  
Wreckage.  
A ship.

\--------Land--------

The horizon was sheer treachery. Kylo stumbled towards the glint of wreckage that never grew any closer with each stabbing footstep. The wound in his shoulder pulled where it scabbed into the ragged quilting of his armor. It's got to come off. The belt pried off easily. Undoing the tunic's fasteners bottom to top meant slowly increasing his agony as he lifted his bad arm. Wriggling the stiff and heavy garment off of his formidable shoulders meant more flesh tearing . He gingerly prodded the exit wound with shaking fingertips. The blast had gone in under the bone and seared through at an oblique angle between an existing anatomical gap of muscle. A lucky shot, or maybe he'd used the Force to swerve its trajectory. He couldn't remember. He realized with a shock he was bruised all over--across his solid ribs, down to the hard edge of his hip. He pulled his waistband out enough to confirm the streaks of ugly purple staining the flanks of his thighs. He matched the sky.

_Hux's rictus of a grin above him_

He remembered. The whipping stacked rotors of the aviso craft thrumming like frantic animals as it hovered above him, traitorous Hux on the gangplank, staring down at where he lay in the dust, content Kylo's bones would rot here on this planet's martyrless grave, his expression rich with schadenfreude as he leveled the weapon--  
flower of rage

That was the ship now crashed on the horizon,  
the toothed hexagon on its rudder . . .

Revelation redoubled Kylo's efforts. His limp towards the downed craft was double-time now. His armor, forgotten in the dust. The closer he got he realized there was a blot of black and crimson on the ground, thrown far from the wreckage. A crumpled thing, too bent in on itself to be a body . . . and then Kylo realized it was a body after all.  
A fine blush of atomized blood spatter surrounded the corpse. What had been a head was now a tortured smear of gore and bone shot through with shocks of orange-tufted scalp.

He remembered. The blindsiding, impulsive coup. The way the blast kicked him into the dust. Hux's cackle. The fury accelerating inside him. The way the Dark Side reached out through him, like a huge intangible fist, and seized the ship and smashed it to the ground like a predator shaking death into its prey. The look of horror on Hux's face as Kylo spared him the crash's impact only to thread taut bands of Force through his quivering body and tear him apart in one sickening moment of molecular butchery--

 _Kill the past if you have to_ \--

On ships, on Starkiller Base, corpses _belonged_. Here, in the midst of the mildest environment, Hux's stillness and brutality resonated with full horror. Kylo had never rended someone apart like that - an act of such monstrous and intimate overkill that it was not part of a Force-bearer's legendary arsenal. Whatever gloating he may have felt, once upon a time, at besting even the matchless Vader in brutality, was only a glowing knot of shame and self-hatred.

_I wish they made restraining bolts for me._

The charred emblem of the First Order on the aviso craft's rudder looked like the swallowing jaws of a Sarlacc. They would be coming for him. The part he hated in himself, the shy child who feared and craved the blessing of authority and the swiftness of its judgment, twinged in sudden icy panic. He was not defenseless -- rage still jittered the midichlorians in him, ready to lash out -- but he was vulnerable, weaponless, wounded, and alone.

The way he always felt was now a grim physical reality, and the sickening irony of it terrified him.

_With all I've done . . .  
. . . why do I live?_

An ominous warm tickle down his nipple interrupted his self-laceration. His blaster wound was weeping. The edges he believed were firmly cauterized to blood-blackness now beaded with fresh blood. He'd dropped his tunic meters back. He'd nothing to compress the wound. He smeared his palm against it in futile aid. It only made the beads drip eagerly now, running into rivulets that streaked down his ribs and dropped gently into the dust. He realized how much he'd been unconsciously compressing the wound with the Force, and now in a moment of suicidal doubt it had faltered, like the unnerving revelation that one's breathing is under both conscious and unconscious control, and the nervous next moment of realizing you might forget to inhale. He was too panicked to return the Force to the site of the injury. The blood was running through his fingertips now and he felt faint. He growled, punched his teeth through his lip hard enough to made it bleed, too, clawed at the gushing wound, hoping paradoxically the self-abuse he'd relied on before would arouse the Dark Side once more enough to save him.

_Vader . . ._  
hear me . . .  
I need . . . 

He knew the distasteful thing he must do to save himself. He knew it and the repugnance of his weakness and the lightheaded confusion made him sink to his knees. Maybe it was time to die.

_Kill it if you have to . . ._  
if you have to . . .  
if . . . 

He knew to do this, or die. His training had not prepared him for this. He reached his consciousness deep inside himself and willed the Dark Side to be still. It fought him, spasming and struggling as one does when being snuffed out, the chemicals of rage and fury inside him not abating

come on! 

not budging, seething with their unholy pain until there was the tiniest crack of serenity, and something suffocated the fire.  
Kylo shuddered, bracing for treachery. Everyone he'd loved who'd sworn allegiance to the Light had betrayed him in their narcissistic righteousness, drugged on virtue, rich with hypocritical self-satisfaction for all their "justified" carnage in the name of their "justified" cause. He expected some delusional revelation would now consume him, devour him, spit him out as a glassy-eyed convert whose agency was no longer his own.  
But it did not. His breathing slowed and the tight fire in his heart unclenched and the torrent became a trickle became a welling of blood in the bullseye. And as the pain abated and the faintest of warm glows pressed softly on the wound he was still himself.  
For a moment he could feel the Force everywhere, not just between minds or as an extension of his grip or as the compassionate compression against his injury, but as a soft sonar that could feel – could know – there was water in this planet, burbling merrily in underground rivulets just below the sandy crust . . . 

_there was life here . . ._

_very close . . ._

A sudden flash of movement broke his concentration. Something humanoid trailing a flap of something darted behind the ship. He was instantly on his feet, snapping the wide holistic net of the Force back into a weapon, penetrating its magnetism through to the blind side of the ship where it found the flickering mind signatures of two sentient beings – afraid, awed, confused – and wrapped his grip around their throats. They were no threat. Simple. Unguarded minds. Scavengers. 

He knew a scavenger,  
once. 

She had made him suffer . . .  
and now these would suffer, too. 

He raced around the ship's perimeter, scraping his prone prey on the ground to sprawl hard and abraded at his feet. And as he loomed over them, the impression he made in their minds – the shock of his naked chest streaked with blood, the breadth of his shoulders, the unholy bloom of his injury, the alien-to-them aquiline profile and shrunken eyes and unpunctured cheeks, the misplaced vengeance in his eyes and the smell of his maleness that filled them with cowering fear – was equal to the breathless impression they made on him. 

_Two women_

__sisters_ _

near-naked, small breasted, white as the salt expanse of Crait, pupil-less smooth carbon eyes, their multiple lop ears fanning rigid with fear, their flattened nostrils and the discreet blowholes dimpling their cheeks flaring and panting in terror 

__they wait to die at my hands_ _

__and one of them wants it_ _


End file.
